2014/22: Should torture be used on suspected terrorists?
Introduction to the media issue
Video clip at right:On December 14, 2014, former United States vice president Dick Cheney is interviewed defending the CIA's interrogation techniques and claiming these techniques did not constitutes torture. If you cannot see this clip, it will be because video is blocked by your network. To view the clip, access from home or from a public library, or from another network which allows viewing of video clips.
What they said...
'We tortured some folks...And we have to as a country take responsibility for that so that hopefully we don't do it again in the future'
United States President Barack Obama
'Had I not authorised waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked'
United States President George W Bush
The issue at a glance
On December 9, 2014, the United States Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence released a redacted (censored) version of the executive summary of its comprehensive investigation into the CIA's detention and interrogation program.
The comprehensive report has come to be known as the 'CIA Torture Report'.
The committee's investigation began in 2009 and three years later resulted in a 6,300 page report with 35,000 footnotes.
The CIA's security concerns about releasing the full report led to a compromise which saw the White House and the committee agree to the release of a redacted version of the executive summary that was 500 pages in length.
The report provides details about the CIA's 'enhanced interrogation' techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the use of stress positions, techniques that human rights groups have described as torture.
President Obama has used the release of this executive summary to acknowledge that torture had been used and to hope that this would not happen again.
Others continue to dispute the use of the word 'torture' to describe CIA practices and claim that the interrogation techniques employed were justified and appropriate as a means of combating terrorism.
(The CIA is the United States Central Intelligence Agency. It is one of the principal intelligence-gathering agencies of the United States federal government.)